SAN FRANCISCO--With both MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and News Corp. chief digital officer Jonathan Miller taking the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, there was naturally plenty of talk about the social site's attempt to reverse its ill fortune of late. Once the biggest name in social networking, it's long since lost that title to Facebook and is trying to reinvent itself as a destination for music and entertainment.
"I think that what you see in the space more than anything else is if you don't keep innovating and moving forward you get in trouble," Miller said in his talk on Thursday morning. "You can't stop, you have to keep going, and (MySpace) didn't keep going, it kind of stopped."
And in that time, he added, "we had two fantastic competitors emerge in Facebook and Twitter."
The previous day, Van Natta made his first big appearance on the conference circuit since he joined MySpace and was tasked with a major turnaround. Van Natta unveiled a new music video hub as well as an enhanced set of marketing tools for music artists--some of which were built in with technology from iLike, which MySpace acquired this summer.
And on Wednesday night, the "new" MySpace was out in full form: a line snaked down three city blocks when music fans caught wind of the fact that the company had booked rock band Weezer for one of its "secret shows" concerts.
"MySpace started with an essence around certain things, and one of them was music, and meeting new people," Miller, a former AOL exec who also joined News Corp. this spring, said on Thursday. "We're going back to basics in that sense, but you've got to make it relevant to today and going forward."
It's obviously too early to tell whether the "reinvention" will work. Some critics say that it's too big of a task, especially given the state of the advertising market. But Miller spent a big portion of his talk at the Web 2.0 Summit hyping up the Fox Audience Network, or FAN, the digital advertising division that News Corp. first announced last spring.
"We kind of broke it out of MySpace and gave it a life of its own," Miller said. "We're just at the beginning of a coming-out party for FAN."
FAN just inked a deal with agency giant Omnicom, and more are on the way, he added. Miller also said FAN is the fifth-largest ad network on the Web, after the usual suspects--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL--and that it's hoping to get into fourth place soon.
Discount retailer Target has signed a deal with photo-sharing service Photobucket, adding it to the small collection of online partners for its in-store photo-printing service.
Through the partnership, members of Photobucket can directly order photos for pickup at most Target stores (presumably any Targets that don't have photo-printing stations would be the exception). Typically, the photos will be ready within an hour.
Photobucket, a unit of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, is the third current partner for the retailer; Target already has partnerships in place with Shutterfly's and Kodak's online photo services.
Last week, Photobucket announced a partnership with start-up Scrapblog to make it easier for members to put their photos into online (and eventually print) scrapbooks.
Photobucket, the massive photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has partnered with Scrapblog, a start-up that lets members create online scrapbooks.
Through the partnership, whose financial terms were not disclosed, Scrapblog's drag-and-drop application will be available within Photobucket so that users can work their Photobucket albums into scrapbooks and then share or embed them on the Web. Starting in September, printed versions of Scrapblog scrapbooks will be available for purchase.
"Scrapbooks have traditionally been an important part of how people have kept and shared memories offline for many years, and bringing that capability online to Photobucket gives users even more options for enhancing their lives and expressing themselves digitally," Photobucket president Alex Welch said in a release. "We are excited to partner with Scrapblog, and be the first photo and video Web site to integrate a digital-scrapbooking feature directly into the site, making it easy, convenient, and accessible to everyone."
Coral Gables, Fla.-based Scrapblog, founded in 2006, has created scrapbook-related marketing campaigns for brands ranging from Carnival Cruise Lines to the ABC television series Ugly Betty (parent company Disney is an investor). Longworth Venture Partners led Scrapblog's Series A venture round in March 2007.
Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. subsidiary that owns social sites MySpace and Photobucket, has signed on as the latest member of the Family Online Safety Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to "identifying and promoting best practice, tools and methods in the field of online safety, that also respect free expression."
As the first social network to become a nationwide teen craze, MySpace became a frequent target for safety advocates--including state lawmakers, who ended up working with the social network to create a safety plan for kids and teens online.
Other prominent members of FOSI include AOL, AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Google, Loopt, Microsoft, Ning, Verizon, and a number of international telecommunications carriers.
"FOSI has been a dedicated leader in promoting online safety and we look forward to contributing to the work they do," Fox Interactive Media Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement Friday. "Internet safety is a key priority for us as we strive to keep all teens safer online. This new membership will further strengthen our efforts and will also allow us to share our expertise with other members."
FOSI holds an annual conference about online safety: this year's will be on December 11 in Washington, D.C.
MySpace, the social network owned by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, announced Wednesday that it has hired five new members for its executive team--three senior vice presidents and two vice president--in fields ranging from engineering to customer service. They're coming from a mixed background of media and tech.
Manu Thapar, former vice president of engineering at Yahoo, has been hired as MySpace's senior vice president of engineering, a role that involves architecture and security management as well as the creation of an offshore development team. Another Yahoo veteran, Tish Whitcraft, has joined MySpace as senior vice president of customer care and will oversee the construction of a "self-help" tool for MySpace users.
On the media side, Angela Courtin has been hired as MySpace's senior vice president of marketing, entertainment, and content. She comes from MTV Networks, where she was vice president of integrated marketing. Jason Oberfest, a former biz-dev guru at Los Angeles Times Interactive, has been hired as vice president of business development to work in both deal making and developer relations. And Abe Thomas, a former employee of eBay and its PayPal subsidiary, has been hired as vice president of online marketing.
But the revolving doors at MySpace are moving fast. TechCrunch reported Tuesday that the company was looking to lay off as much as 5 percent of its workforce, which chief operating officer Amit Kapur confirmed to the blog later in the day. But the exec classified the move as "performance driven," meaning that fired employees would be replaced and that MySpace was actually looking to hire as many as 300 new employees.
The hiring announcement comes so close on the heels of the layoff reports that conspiracy theorists might speculate MySpace put out a release about fairly recent executive picks to temper any bad press. But when asked, a MySpace representative classified the hires as "very recent...or are locked and loaded to start soon," so it's more likely that personnel changes just happened to fall into the rumor mill at an opportune time.
Looks like some big-media deal-making went into this one.
Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has announced the launch of an iPhone application (download), just like everybody else.
Users can browse their Photobucket albums, as well as upload images from the iPhone to the service with a single click. The application costs $4.99.
But Photobucket had a more interesting announcement on Thursday, namely a multiyear partnership with Ask.com, the search engine owned by new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp.
Through the deal, Photobucket will use exclusively Ask.com search for its photo, video, and Web searches, and some of Ask.com's text and display ads will be shown on Photobucket. No financial specifics were mentioned.
"Photobucket has one of the largest online audiences, and now Ask.com provides these consumers with the answers to the questions they ask every day," said Andrew Moers, general manager of partnerships for Ask, the No. 4 player in search. "This alliance furthers our strategy to bring Ask.com to consumers worldwide through a broad range of Internet access points."
Photobucket sister company MySpace, meanwhile, has its search (and many of its ads) handled by Google. But on that note, Google has provided ad technology to Ask.com since the dinosaur days of 2004.
Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, is expected to launch a "group albums" feature on Wednesday.
"Group Albums are designed to offer a simple way for colleagues, friends, and families to collaborate on creating photos and video collections where the entire group can contribute, access, and enjoy them," Photobucket President Alex Welch explained in a statement Tuesday. Photobucket released its first developer application program interface (API) last month.
Basically, these are collaborative media-sharing albums much like the "groups" feature in Yahoo's Flickr. Photobucket's release suggests that they could be used to pool photos and videos of weddings, graduations, concerts, and the like. You could also create groups for pictures of dogs on skateboards, superhero-inspired Halloween costumes, or whatever else you might want, but keep in mind that Photobucket likes to keep things squeaky-clean.
Additional features of Photobucket's group albums, which have a 1GB storage limit, include the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of updates, create a slideshow, and if you're the group owner, get e-mail notifications when new photos or video are added.
Group administrators also can create their own easy-to-remember URLs, for example, photobucket.com/cuteboyswithnoshirts.
Reuters reported on Monday afternoon that social-networking site MySpace.com plans to launch a "news feed" feature in the near future.
The statement was made by Peter Levinsohn, president of MySpace parent company (and News Corp. division) Fox Interactive Media, at the Reuters Media Summit on Monday. "The concept of a news feed is something we are very focused on, and we'll be well down the path in the next 30 to 45 days," Levinsohn said at the summit.
The news feed, which provides a user with updates from the people on his or her friends list, was pioneered by MySpace rival Facebook. Originally seen as invasive and "stalker-ish," the news feed is now considered by many to be one of Facebook's chief innovations.
Additionally, Reuters reported, Levinsohn said that MySpace will start allowing its members to operate different versions of a profile for groups like family, friends, and co-workers. This is something that Facebook does not offer--though the company has hinted that it may be on the way--but more recent entrants like Plaxo Pulse do.
MySpace, to put it bluntly, is playing catch-up. It still leads the U.S. social-networking market in overall membership and traffic, but has come under fire for everything from design to usability to underlying architecture. In recent weeks, the company has opted to join Google's OpenSocial platform, potentially boosting its tech cred--and announced a targeted advertising program days before Facebook launched its "Social Ads."
Fox might mean business, but it also means unintentional comedy.
(Credit: Fox Business Network)The Writers Guild of America can keep up its strike--there's plenty of unscripted comedy on the fledgling Fox Business Network.
On its morning show, Money for Breakfast (full disclosure: I have been a guest on Money for Breakfast), anchor Alexis Glick accidentally reported that Apple had taken an 8 percent stake in chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices.
"There's some news coming across the tape right now," Glick said on the live program. "We're seeing from Wall Street Journal that Apple is buying an 8 percent stake in AMD."
Money for Breakfast host Alexis Glick
(Credit: Fox Business Network)In fact, it was the government of the United Arab Emirates state of Abu Dhabi, not Apple, that had purchased the stake in AMD. Yes, yes, I know Steve Jobs' Cupertino empire really could be mistaken for a cash-flooded sovereignty sometimes. But let's be serious. Apple? Abu Dhabi?
When the mistake became clear, Glick's co-host, Peter Barnes, said, "Oh, the Arabs. OK." To make matters worse, the program even referred to the country incorrectly, as "Abu Dubai," not "Abu Dhabi."
Even funnier, contributing analyst Charles Payne--the founder and CEO of Wall Street Strategies--had gone right along with the gaffe. "That's real smart by Apple because AMD is in trouble right now," he had said to Glick. "AMD has always had two problems: either it had a great product that was either sometimes superior to Intel but not the distribution, or it would have a terrible product that obviously they couldn't compete."
Never mind the fact that Apple has been stocking its computers with, um, Intel chips, and has been doing so for over two years. If Jobs & Co. had bought a stock in AMD, that'd be beyond huge news.
It doesn't look like any video of the snafu has surfaced (yet), but check out the transcript, courtesy of the Silicon Alley Insider. It literally reads like something out of Anchorman or a Saturday Night Live skit:
... Read More
Pirates getting in the way of business? Let's form Voltron.
(Credit: TV Tokyo)The announcement has been made--read CNET News.com's full coverage here.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that an impressive cast of major media and technology companies plans to announce a high-profile list of joint guidelines for preserving copyright and fighting piracy online. Sources told The Journal that the companies involved include media moguls CBS Corp., NBC Universal, News Corp.'s Fox (and its MySpace social network), Viacom, and Disney, as well as tech icon Microsoft and French video-sharing site DailyMotion.
It's unclear whether these are the only parties involved in the deal. Inquiries to several of the companies allegedly involved in the agreement went unanswered.
The most notable party absent from the group is Google, according to The Journal's Kevin Delaney. Apparently, the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech titan had been in talks about joining but did not go through with it. Google is the parent company of YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing site that had come under fire from media companies for making it easy to share copyrighted content.
Google recently announced an antipiracy technology initiative for YouTube.
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